CalvinDude.com

Had this little couplet pop into my mind:

Everything that is, when seen through time’s lens,
Was built on the ashes of all our might-have-beens.

Seems to be a truism. Or, as The Offspring might say, a Half-Truism.

You’re not old until you ask that. So I guess I’m old now…. :-P

While I have a good program that helps to cut down the amount of spam I receive, occasionally the spam-bots wise up and alter their programming and, for a few weeks, I get flooded with spam again. It’s like an arms race in biology.

Except it comes to mind that really Darwinism only works in computer theory, when you can boil everything down to one or two essential factors and create an arms race out of it. In biological systems, there are more factors involved (something that Darwinists continually forget) meaning that an increase in one aspect does not necessarily translate into an increase in fitness across the board.

But with computer programs and spam bots, the theory works just fine.

First we have this headline:

Xbox Gamer Dies of Blood Clot After Marathon Session

Obviously, the takeaway from this is: If you stay inside, you will DIE!!!!

Then we have this article:

S.C. High School Football Player Dies After Practice.

Obviously, the takeaway from this is: If you go outside, you will DIE!!!!

I may regret having done the right thing…but I’m never sorry for it.

Sometimes, I think that the evil machines that write spam must think the average person is really stupid.

Then I remember who’s in the White House.

The machines are right.

For the Fourth of July, I visited my grandparents and one of the many topics of discussion happened to briefly touch on the subject of profanity. For instance, my grandmother said she always considers the s-word to be profane, even after I pointed out that it has identical meaning to other words not considered profane (e.g., “dung”) which she has no problem saying. (A quick aside: to my mind, this makes no sense, as it makes the sound or letters of a word morally objectional rather than the content of the word.)

In any case, I was thinking today and remembered the song The Bad Touch by The Bloodhound Gang. This song is available on YouTube, but I’m not linking it here and wouldn’t play it for my grandmother despite the fact it contains exactly zero words commonly classified as profanity. Why? Because the song, without using a single profanity, is more profane than any “four-letter word” that my grandmother would dislike.

What I give form to in daylight is only one percent of what I’ve seen in darkness.

–M.C. Escher
(quoted in Gardner, Martin. The Colossal Book of Mathematics W.W. Norton & Company. New York (2001). p. 212)

And of course I can’t quote Escher without playing Escher’s World:

Lyrics by Steve Taylor:

Through the passing strange I fell
To the wide-eyed opposite
My agenda was hidden well
Now I don’t know where I left it

I woke up in Escher’s World today
My mother said it was okay

Up’s down, down is out, out is in
Stairways circle back to where you’ve been
Time falls, water crawls, are you listening?

Did you ever chase your tail
Through a maze of exit doors?
I have seen the light by Braille
I have blazed the road before us

We’re walking in Escher’s World again
Rise up you nimble-minded men

Birds roar, lions soar, sheep are cruel
Snails pace, papers chase, midgets rule
Stuffed shirts, status hurts, we ain’t foolin’
We ain’t foolin’, we ain’t foolin’.

Let the sequels have their day
Yeah, the remake’s on its way

We’re living in Escher’s world it seems
We’re wide awake within our dreams

Socks hop, lemons drop, butter flies
Tough wimps, sado-shrimps, mojos rise
Pips squeak, widows peek, are you surprised?

Oh, living in Escher’s world, oh.

We’re living in Escher’s world it seems
We’re wide awake within our dreams

Birds roar, lions soar, sheep are cruel
Snails pace, papers chase, midgets rule
Stuffed shirts, Ethel Mertz, we ain’t fooling

Socks hop, lemons drop, butter flies
Tough wimps, sado-shrimps, mojos rise
Pips squeak, widows peek, are you surprised?

Up’s down, down is out, out is in
Time falls, water crawls, are you listening?
|: Stairways circle back to where you’ve been :|

Don’t let the title of this post fool you; I’m actually only going to say a really short thing. Given my previous post, which deals with Einstein’s Relativity, I thought it would be interesting to pass on something I once read, I believe in one of Brain Green’s books (i.e. The Fabric of the Cosmos or The Elegant Universe). However, it might have also been in Genius by James Gleick. Don’t quote me on it, but it went like this:

Relativity is counter-intuitive and doesn’t make sense at first. But it obeys the rules and once you figure them out, you can train yourself to make sense of it. Quantum Mechanics, on the other hand, is not only counter-intuitive, but you can’t train yourself to make sense of it either.

And of course I could throw in the comment usually attribuited to Niels Bohr: “If you think you’ve understood Quantum Mechanics, you haven’t understood it.” (Of course I’ve heard variations on this quote too; but this is my favorite version of it.)

How is it possible for someone to suddenly scream, “LAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!” in a high-pitched opera voice and think it’s anything other than annoying?

Yet a certain person does it all the time here at work. Grrrr.

Mike Straka, where are you?